In 1798, Samuel Taylor Coleridge published The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in Lyrical Ballads — co-authored with Wordsworth and printed in Bristol, England — a visionary narrative poem in which a sailor's shooting of an albatross results in the catastrophic loss of wind, stranding the ship in an equatorial calm ('As idle as a painted ship / Upon a painted ocean'). The poem's sustained engagement with wind — its absence, its supernatural restoration, and its moral meaning — made it the central literary text connecting wind, guilt, atonement, and the natural sublime in English Romantic poetry. Lyrical Ballads is widely regarded as the founding document of English Romanticism.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is arguably the single most wind-saturated poem in the English canon, using the presence and absence of wind as the primary moral and narrative engine of the poem. Its influence on subsequent poetry treating wind as a spiritual or environmental force is incalculable, from Shelley's Ode to the West Wind to Ted Hughes's Weather poetry. The poem also helped define the Romantic aesthetic of the natural sublime in which elemental forces — wind, ice, ocean — serve as mirrors of psychological and moral states.